To each according to their ability? Academic ranking and salary inequality across public colleges and universities

ABSTRACT

This article compares the salary structure of tenured and tenure-track faculty across schools within the university systems of North Carolina and New York. Specifically, we establish a positive relationship between school prestige and salary inequality, both overall and within specific academic ranks. This result suggests that the value to teaching is less discipline-specific than the value to research output. Marked differences in the aforementioned statistical linkage across academic ranks also confirm prior speculation that junior faculty salaries are more closely tied to academic value than senior faculty salaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Higher education
• salary inequality
• academic labour market

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D33
• I22
• J21

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Pennsylvania salaries at fully public institutions, for example, are often identical to the penny.

² The fact that research institutions’ departments tend to be larger and require, therefore, a smaller percentage of department chairs, programme directors, etc. works against our results. Because the degree of extra salary and responsibility varies so markedly within auxiliary occupational roles, we make no distinction between faculty who carry such responsibilities and those who do not.

³ The STATA module ginidesc (Aliaga and Montoya 1999) was used to perform the calculations.

⁴ UNC Asheville is ranked as a national liberal arts college and omitted from this particular analysis.

⁵ Bear in mind that a higher ranking is a lower number, which implies a larger Gini coefficient.